Next-generation Hybrid Cloud: What enterprises want from tech vendors

Kicking off the new year with a hot topic. Five great experts will talk about Hybrid Cloud.

Do all roads in the Cloud lead to Hybrid Cloud? It appears no matter where the enterprises start their journey to cloud - public or private cloud - they end up with a hybrid cloud solution. Although hybrid cloud provides a variety of advantages, it still raises issues about privacy, security and performance that need to be addressed.

This thought-provoking meetup on Jan 20th will dive deep into the issues of hybrid cloud implementation. We have brought together IT executives from enterprise Avaya, services company Pythian to debate the pros and cons with leading technology providers VMware and Cisco. And, with audience we have been getting at past meet ups, this evening promises to be exciting start to the year.

Speakers:

Saravan Rajendran - Cisco Systems
Vice President and General Manager
Cloud Networking and Services Group (CNSG)

Jake Chacko - AvayaVice President Cloud Offers and Systems & Solutions Engineering

Aaron Lee - PythianChief Digital Officer

Jai Malkani - VMWareDirector of Product Management for vCloud and vRealize

Prabakar Sundarrajan - The FabricChief Strategy Officer

Speakers BIOs:

Saravan Rajendran is Vice President and General Manager of the Cloud Networking and Services Group (CNSG) within Cisco’s Cloud and Virtualization Group. He is responsible for Cisco’s Hybrid Cloud solution called Cisco Intercloud Fabric as well as Cisco’s Virtual and Cloud Networking solutions including Nexus 1000V product line across multiple hypervisors, Nexus 1010 & 1100 series and projects in the area of virtual and cloud network services. Rajendran has an active role across Cisco and with partners in the development and execution of Cisco’s Intercloud, Cloud Networking, Virtualization and SDN/NFV strategies. Rajendran co-founded the concept of Intercloud Fabric – a Hybrid Cloud technology that was patented in 2009 when the concept of “Hybrid Clouds” did not exist.

Rajendran was co-founder of Desana Systems (funded by Sequoia Capital and Mayfield Ventures) which grew from a company of 8 to 120 employees delivering an intelligent L4-7 switch in 2001.

Rajendran holds a bachelor’s degree in electronics and communications engineering from Anna University, India, and a master’s degree in computer science and telecommunications from the University of Missouri. He also holds over 17 patents in the areas of switching, service chaining and virtual networking.

Jake Chacko is currently Vice President of Cloud Offer Management as well as Systems and Solutions Engineering based out of the Santa Clara Headquarters. Jake and his team are responsible for driving systems and new solutions including Cloud. His team also has the Quality Assurance across Avaya’s Engagement Solutions.

Prior to Avaya, Jake held several executive positions in 11 years at Cisco. Most recently his team drove M&A for the $10 B Cisco Services business while at the same time driving emerging solutions under the company's Smart & Connected Communities Strategic Initiative. During this assignment, Jake spent 3 years in Bangalore, India helping set up Cisco's second largest site while reporting to the Executive Vice President of Cisco Services and the company's Chief Globalization Officer. This C level officer was also based in Bangalore while reporting to the CEO. Jake held other executive positions in Cisco San Jose including General Manager of the Carrier Voice Gateway Business Unit in the Service Provider space.

Prior to Cisco, Jake founded WebDialogs, a web collaboration cloud service provider that was acquired by IBM. He also spent time in various executive and management positions in marketing and engineering at Rockwell International and at Bell Labs/ATT.

Jake has an MBA from the Wharton School and Electrical Engineering degrees from the University of California Berkeley and Lehigh University. He is an avid tennis player who used to be good.

Jai Malkani is the Director of Product Management for the vCloud and vRealize Product Suites at VMware. He is one of the startup members of the Management Business Unit, which he helped grow to over $1B in annual revenue, and is responsible for creating its flagship offering - vRealize Operations. At VMware, Jai is responsible for product strategy, product management, and go-to-market activities relating to VMware’s cloud management platform for software defined data-centers across private and public clouds.

Jai has over 15 years of experience in leading Product Management, Marketing, Sales and IT functions in global technology companies such as VMware, Symantec and Cisco Systems.

Jai has an MBA from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Union College in NY, and Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from University of Mumbai.

Aaron Lee is the Chief Digital Officer at Pythian, where he lead a process of continuous digital transformation that differentiates Pythian in the eyes of our ecosystem by evaluating, adopting and leveraging emerging technology and technique to create competitive advantage. Previous he was VP of Transformation Services to lead Pythian's solutions business to deliver the benefits of postmodern technology strategy and culture, development, DevOps, cloud, big data, and data science to tomorrow's leading digital enterprises.

He was General Manager at Blackbird which was created with the merger of his startup DriveDev and Palominodb into a full-stack consulting and managed services company.
Aaron Lee is a strategic thinker and an outstanding business leader. He is the best at creating high end technical and business solutions for startups and Fortune 100 companies.

Prabakar Sundarrajan is an experienced serial entrepreneur. He is currently the Co-founder and Chief Strategist of The Fabric, which co-creates networking companies with other entrepreneurs.

Previously, Prabakar drove Juniper’s content and media strategy and the technology for its media delivery infrastructure solutions. Prior to joining Juniper via the acquisition of Ankeena, Prabakar co-founded Ankeena Networks. Before that he was at Citrix Systems, driving the technology vision and product strategy of the company’s Application Networking Group. Prabakar joined Citrix via its acquisition of NetScaler Inc., where he served as CTO and EVP of Strategic Planning and Corporate Development. Prior to Netscaler, Prabakar was Senior VP of Technology at Exodus Communications.

Prabakar has has held a variety of executive positions spanning engineering, marketing and business strategy at companies such as Intel, HP and IBM. And, Prabakar has served on the board of directors and/or technical advisory board of several companies and is a charter member of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE).

Prabakar holds an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and B.S. in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.